From Simplicity to Novelty

You’re all brainwashed. Sorry, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but it’s time you knew. It all started when an animate majesty of color and energy flew singing into your nursery, memorizing and entrancing you, and then your mom came in and tiled over the miracle with the word “bird”. By the time you were 5 years old the alchemical gold of the universe had become a carefully constructed tile mosaic of language, but it didn’t stop there. The next step was to establish normality and create a craving for it inside your psyche. You are culturally imprisoned because you have been socially constructed.

In my original “What is Philosophy” post I concluded that philosophy is simply asking questions, the desire to deconstruct. I believe this still holds accurate, and this is what I’ll attempt to show you now.

Don’t believe anything, ever, and here’s why: because belief precludes you from the possibility of truth in the opposite, the possibility that everything you know might be wrong. Religion is the worst for this because it relies on more than belief, it relies on faith. Funny thing is, socially accepted sciences are just as bad! Science is uncomfortably dogmatic and ironically illogistical in nature. Really, all sciences are just jealous of physics, because physics is the most mathematically accurate and predictable of them all. Chemistry is a close second, but there’s still room for error. Biology doesn’t make any categorical sense, but I’ll get to that. By the time you get to psychology or sociology, repeatability (that is the basis of scientific inquiry) goes out the window!

Now, however close physics thought it got to objectivity, it has two major issues. The first of which is that physics relies on the consistency of the universal constants (constants like the speed of light or gravity). Assume for a second we were to discover that these constants were attached to time, and shift, perhaps in waves. Maybe in some variation of the future you’ll look at your kitchen smart-window and see “Global Warming is still a thing, the dollar is down, and the speed of light is up slightly today”. This is an example of a change in metaphysical foundation that would open physics to a whole new realm of possible discovery, but also demand of it total reconstruction. From this place one might look back at dogmatic sciences of today and say “they might as well have thought the Earth was flat”. The truth is that nobody really knows jack shit about what’s going on.

The second flaw is far more interesting because it is something that has only very recently come out of physics. It is the idea of quantum physics, and it more closely resembles ramblings from the Upanishads than anything “modern science” should be concluding. The idea of a unity of consciousness is something that has been mumbled by elderly Amazonian Shamans for thousands of years, but now it’s being approached and explained through modern means such as mathematical physics or perhaps transcendental meditation.

This makes one think that the notion of the transcendental object at the end of time might just fulfill the expectations of all religious and scientific prophecy but in a more mature and logical (by no human definition of the word) manor. It just might be that, at this apocalyptic moment, Joycian literature could in fact recreate and reconstruct the seminal cosmic plasma of which we are all dancing mice. Don’t worry, I know this isn’t going to make much sense right now. “Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk” didn’t make much sense either, but how else are you supposed to explain the sound of God’s wrath at witnessing original sin within the constricting-mosaic-tile-boundaries that is the English language?

Let me deconstruct one dogmatic principle you probably have a handle on, Evolution. Nature is not inherently categorical, it is humans who have made a (perhaps failed) attempt to organize something which is not naturally organized by human construct, but rather by chaos or the attracting force of novelty or something like that. This novel transcendence may be pulling nature (and now us) towards it just as we have pushed off the simplicity behind us, but again I’ll get to that. Back to evolution. Evolution doesn’t make a lick of sense, and here’s why. Evolutionary theory simply assumes that the best genetic traits are passed on generation to generation, and this is how it chooses to account for human advancement, but this is not so. Obviously this is not so! Only the traits that allowed us to best survive were passed on. Now a surviving species does not create language or song, renaissance, painting, poetry, music, or film. Nor do they seek altered states of consciousness, meditate, or worship. Or maybe they did, I mean that would explain why we are where we are now, but it fails to explain why we got here. We are obviously not evolving for survival! The example of western society tears the theory of evolution apart, with health care alone survival of the fittest is long lost. Why then have we not taken torches and pitchforks to modern biology? Frankly my dear, because people don’t give a damn.

In researching this I’ve come across a theory that neatly explains this and suits to wrap this speech up with a bow. As I explain this, however, I strongly encouraged you not to believe it as that would preclude you from believing the opposite! It’s the universal pursuit of novelty. Let’s contextualize this into our example of natural and human evolution. Nature built upon itself slowly, advancing upon that which it had previously created. This is how Bio 11 is set up, to analyze an increasing of complexity in Mother Gaia’s creations. At one point, at the peak of a wave of immense novelty, nature unlocked genetics, DNA. Level up! Genetics grew exponentially complex over a long period of time. Eventually the organisms they’d blueprinted (enigmatically) were able to unlock another major achievement that would, in future, allow for amazing complexity and novelty, and there for must be a result or expression of a time-wave of novelty itself. This was language, and it was this that allowed for song and poetry and James Joyce and Marshall McLuhan and so on and so forth.

In recently years the quickening and exponential increase of complexity and novelty has become undeniably evident. We’re unlocked another achievement, and climbed another rung of the evolutionary ladder (or pyramid or dodecahedron or whatever floats your boat and tickles your ticklish bits). This pinnacle is nothing other than (who’d have guessed) technology. Technology has unlocked within the human race a complexity of dominatrix proportions.

It only makes sense to me that something of this immensity must be an attracting force, pulling evolution towards itself. I like to use the evolution metaphor to create distrust of chaos theory. For me I picture it as this: our chaos is simply wiggle room, left or right, but the truth of the matter is that we are between two towering walls, coming from universal simplicity, trapped by the forward momentum of time, being lured by the smell of pie in a windowsill, and what is this pie pray tell? It is novelty itself, at its purest and most transcendental, and if today were 10 years ago today it would not be farfetched (given this speech) to assume that the end of time and the purely novel and transcendental object that beckons from there would arrive at the end of the I Ching and Mayan calendar and the aligning of the galactic center point on December 21st 2012.

I think I’ll drop the mic here, thank you for your patience those (majority) of you who are utterly and hopelessly lost.